


but i'll be close behind

by idaate



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-26
Updated: 2017-05-26
Packaged: 2018-11-05 00:53:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11002554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idaate/pseuds/idaate
Summary: [ MAJOR V3 SPOILERS ]Nightmares are just a prescribed side-effect of surviving killing games.





	but i'll be close behind

When Harukawa has nightmares, it isn’t quite obvious at first.

The first telltale sign is that Yumeno wakes up with all the blankets piled on her, nearly smothering her alive as the heat pours down and she’s left gasping, trying to prioritize breathing over everything else. Once she calms herself down and can pull the fabrics off of her face, however, Harukawa’s in full view next to her, clutching at the mattress with fingers so tense her veins pop.

At a glance, that’s fine - Harukawa’s fine, they’re all fine - and if Yumeno didn’t have ears or eyes, she might have almost believed that the girl was fine herself. But she  _ does  _ have those things, both of those things, ears that pick up patterns of gasps that try to fill up lungs with too-little air and eyes that notice the sweat beading down Harukawa’s forehead.

She doesn’t know what to do, not for a couple moments, and then she leans down and tries grasping at the girl’s shoulder.

“Hey, are you--” she starts off, and then it’s  _ Yumeno  _ who can’t breathe as Harukawa’s hands wrap around her neck and she has to take a couple seconds to make sure the spots in her eyes disappear.

“It’s,” Yumeno’s own voice echoes in her ears and she has to swallow, trying to keep herself tied to consciousness, trying to think what others (tenko) would do in a situation like this, “it’s alright, I’m...here. You’re-- you’re alright. H-Harukawa!”

There’s no response for a couple seconds and a brief flash of panic rushes through Yumeno’s veins as she considers briefly the possibility of Harukawa never waking up, of her hands growing tighter and tighter and tighter around her neck till it just  _ snaps  _ and then Yumeno will be deaddeaddead as a doornail, dead cause her neck is broken and messed up just like-- just like--

She doesn’t have to worry about that for very long, though, because suddenly there’s the sound of Saihara barging into the room with a “what’s wrong” and an “oh my God” sitting on his lips and he pulls Yumeno away, giving her a moment, a gasp of air. “Harukawa!” he says, far louder than the pathetic attempt of a whisper Yumeno had tried saying, “Harukawa, it’s  _ us!  _ It’s alright!”

Like a light switch, Harukawa’s eyes flicker open and she gasps awake, eyes flirting in every which direction as her nails stop grasping at nothing, as she lets go of the knife that was never in her hands. She glances over at the two of them, the hazy daze of sleep still in her eyes as she slowly begins to process that this isn’t the killing game anymore. Her shoulders relax.

“Sorry,” she says, and her voice sounds like she’s been sobbing all night. Yumeno wonders if that’s what she was doing before the redhead woke up and noticed. “Did I...hurt either of you?”

“No.” Yumeno lies, but she says it too quickly and Saihara winces just slightly enough for Harukawa to realize that it's a fib. She curses under her breath and turns away, thick eyebrows furrowed into a dark frown.

“Sorry,” she says again, and they all sit awkwardly for a bit, too awake to go right back to sleep and pretend nothing happened and too asleep to say much of anything.

The silence is split when Yumeno clears her throat and begins to hum a bit off-key. Saihara looks just slightly surprised by the noise and Harukawa either annoyed or bemused, which makes her pause for all of a millisecond. Yumeno takes her bets on Harukawa’s face being the latter, though, and even if she  _ was  _ annoyed it’s better to be annoyed than scared or sad, right?

She goes from humming ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ to ‘Do You Know the Muffin Man’ to the theme song of a show not about killing but of ponies and friendship and magic. She keeps on humming till Saihara’s eyes droop, and soon enough, so do hers. 

Yumeno forgets if Harukawa ended up falling asleep to her (very bad) voice or not, but when she wakes up, the dark haired girl is fast asleep on the bed with her chest going up and down in the gentlest of flutters.

 

.

 

When Saihara has nightmares, he screams.

When it happens for the first time, Yumeno’s jolted violently from her sleep and she gasps, gazing around the room in a stunned stupor. Harukawa’s awake in an instant, too, far from the lightest sleeper in the house. They glance at each other before Harukawa rockets out of the bed, but Yumeno’s mind is still half-asleep so she’s slower, pulling a blanket behind her as she climbs out of bed and slips on a pair of warm, fluffy socks so she doesn’t have to feel the cold of the wooden floor. 

Even despite all this, though, she’s less than thirty seconds behind Harukawa and still catches the taller girl bursting into Saihara’s room. The phony detective thrashes wildly on his bed, hands caught up in the sheets as a whine escapes from his lips in shaky, panicked breaths.

“Saihara!” Harukawa’s voice is authoritative, more so than Yumeno’s will ever be, but apparently it’s easier for Saihara to wake up for others than for himself because he just keeps on  _ screaming. _

It’s a painful noise, one that makes Yumeno whimper herself and cover her ears. She wants the noise to stop, to  _ stopstopstop  _ but Saihara needs help, doesn’t he? So why isn’t-- why isn’t she doing  _ anything-- _

“Saihara!” Harukawa steps onto the bed, shaking the boy roughly by his shoulders. “Saihara, it’s just a dream! Wake  _ up!” _

“I-it’s just a dream!” Yumeno repeats, and crawls into bed with the two of them, and just like that, Saihara’s eyes snap open.

There’s a vacant look in them that scares her, and she clutches tighter onto her blanket, teeth digging into her lower lip. He looks around for a moment, chest still fluttering irregularly, before he gets a grasp on the situation and covers his face with his hands.

“Fuck,” he mutters, and the noise is muffled by the palms of his hands. “Sorry for waking you guys up.”

“Don’t apologize,” Harukawa says stiffly, and Yumeno wiggles a little bit closer to Saihara, trying to cover him up with her blanket. It takes two tries, but she succeeds in it eventually, even if it’s an awkward placement. He offers her a watery smile anyway, so she chalks it up as a score as she moves his arm to wrap around her, snuggling under his warm grasp.

“Saihara, you what kind of songs do you like?” she says after a couple moments. “I wanna hum you somethin’ too.”

“Oh no, it’s alright.” He chuckles lightly.

“So, you don’t like my humming?” she challenges, and Harukawa fails in trying to hide her smirk with her hand.

“Th-that’s not what I…” But Saihara is too tired to argue, so he sighs. “Mm. Take your pick.”

“Alrighty then!” Yumeno says, and launches into the worst rendition anyone’s ever heard of Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9, No. 2 because that’s the song she heard the day earlier over the piano station that Saihara plays in his room when he’s feeling particularly bad and he thinks no one can hear it.

She can hear his breathing get faster - how can she  _ not,  _ her head’s right by his chest - but for some reason, she doesn’t stop. If anything, her humming only gets louder, as if that will block out the noise of the sobs that wretch themselves from Saihara’s chest like tumbling waves. After a couple more seconds of hesitance, Harukawa joins in on the hug pile, as well, and Saihara clutches onto the fabric of their pajamas like it’s his lifeline.

(it might as well be, yumeno considers)

It takes him a whole hour, maybe even more, of whimpers that sound something like “it was _my fault”_ and “why wasn’t it _I_ who died?” (questions that neither yumeno or harukawa can answer because they haven’t managed to figure out the answer when they sit by themselves and ponder it as well) before Saihara calms down, falling into a somewhat restful slumber. Yumeno and Harukawa fall asleep too. 

They wake up in the morning in a tangle of bedsheets and limbs, and it’s somewhat pleasant, almost. 

 

.

 

A therapist that works for Team Danganronpa (in other words, a therapist whose credibility was questionable at best) hums over a stack of papers with the slightest of curls to their lips and suggests that they try thinking about what sort of dreams their peers (have? have had? would have had?), as if that’ll somehow banish them like one of Yumeno’s spells.

“Well, it’s worth a shot,” Saihara says, and then they’re going to the store and buying the biggest whiteboards that they can find along with several packages of dry erase markers.

The return on public transit is quite awkward as well, especially when Yumeno says “Isn’t it weird how public transit works? That guy over there on his phone could be writing stories about vore and we wouldn’t even know it,” so Saihara has to shush her hurriedly and apologize to the man, who had had his headphones in the entire time and didn’t even hear the quip Yumeno made.

Nonetheless, after much difficulty, they find themselves sitting at the kitchen table with a whiteboard each and a black and white printout of the faces of all of their (dead) classmates. Y’know, just in case they forgot someone.

“Alright!” Saihara says determinedly as Yumeno draws cat faces on her whiteboard and tries imitating them herself, letting out little “abuu abuu”s from cupped lips. “Let’s take it from the top, shall we? We’ve got to start somewhere, after all!”

His false bravado isn’t lost on either of the two girls, and Harukawa raises a dull eyebrow. “So, like, death order, or…?”

Saihara pauses, and then, “Yeah. Guess so.”

“Amami probably has terrible dreams.” Yumeno decides to get the ball rolling. “Because he’s a terrible boy. Dreams about...uhm…” she narrows her eyes and works her tongue across her bottom lip, trying to think. Saihara and Harukawa let her. “Crabs. Yeah, crabs. He dreams about giant crabs that chase him with lightning shooting from their eyes and also loafers on their ugly crab feet.”

The gaze she shoots them challenges them to contradict her, but Saihara simply marks it down with a very serious expression on his face. “Sounds good,” he hums, and Yumeno beams.

“Amami down. Akamatsu’s next.” Harukawa draws a dot on Amami’s face on the paper with her dry erase maker and holds up two fingers. Yumeno goes back to drawing cat faces, trying not to look at Saihara. “Hers would probably be something dumb, right? Bad dreams, I mean. Her bad dreams would be something dumb.”

“Maybe.” Saihara’s voice is quiet, and Yumeno’s surprised he doesn’t sound like he’s on the verge of tears. “I think...it would be something like. She could only play one song on the piano? Something that was really dumb, too, and no matter how hard she tried to play something else, it would just be ‘twinkle twinkle little star’.” He laughs at that. No one else does. He writes it down anyway. Harukawa puts another dot on Akamatsu’s face, and Yumeno thinks it looks a little like a heart.

The name “Hoshi” is barely out of Harukawa’s mouth before Yumeno sits up and says “he would have bad dreams about being vored” and both Saihara and Harukawa stare at her with even stranger expressions than beforehand.

“What is  _ up  _ with you and vore today?” Harukawa hums nonchalantly, and Yumeno shrugs. She might have a better, more accurate idea of what sort of bad dreams Hoshi would have, but vore (vore? vore. it sounded funny and felt nice on her tongue) was a more pleasant thought to toy with. Nonetheless, Saihara writes it down with a persistence that Yumeno has to admire. Another dot is drawn on the paper, Yumeno adds a body to one of her cat faces.

They go through the rest of their dead friends(?) that way, ‘cause Tojo would have a big mess that she wouldn’t be able to clean up and Angie would only be able to draw dicks no matter how hard she tried and they skip Chabashira because Iruma would have dreams about sex and Gonta about the entire population of bugs being wiped out in a singular night.

When they get to Ouma, Saihara’s marker gives pause before he draws a big, thick question mark, placing so much pressure on the marker’s nub that Yumeno has to cover her ears because it’s far, far too squeaky. She almost makes a quip about how Ouma was a nightmare in himself, but that would mean Saihara would have to erase his question mark and wouldn’t that be a waste of marker ink?

Momota dreams of stars. Shirogane dreams of killing games gone right. Kiibo dreams of being human.

By the time they finish, Yumeno’s whiteboard is covered completely in cat faces, some smudged because she leaned over a bit too much and messed them all up. Saihara ran out of room on his whiteboard, so he went onto Harukawa’s, who hadn't ended up writing anything on it in the first place. 

“Well.” Harukawa pops her lips and leans back in her chair, balancing the dry erase marker on her lip like a knife. “What are we gonna do with all this? Frame it and hang it on the wall?”

Saihara opens his mouth, but not before Yumeno says “Why not?” and for the third time, Harukawa and Saihara look over at her in bemused amazement. “I-I mean…” she mutters and folds her arms, staring at the cats on her whiteboard. “There’s nothing stopping us. And why shouldn’t we?”

There’s a pause. Saihara chews on his marker cap. “You know what? Sure,” he decides. “No framing, though. Just hanging.”

And so that’s what they do, getting some nails and hooks from the convenience store down the block. They decide to hang up the whiteboards in the hallway upstairs, where all their rooms are, so they can see them before they go to bed. Harukawa pulls up an instructional video from Youtube and dictates what Saihara needs to do, but he messes up anyway of course, slipping and making a hole in the wall with a hammer. That kind of looks like a cat too (if yumeno has a really big imagination, which she does) so as Saihara decides to pass the hammer onto Harukawa she doodles around it with a sharpie instead of a dry erase marker.

Harukawa’s better at hanging the whiteboards than Saihara is, and they look at their messy handiwork with pride together. “All the words are going to disappear within a week,” Harukawa notes, and Saihara shrugs. 

“They’re here now, aren’t they?”

 

.

 

Yumeno doesn’t have nightmares. Yumeno only has very sad dreams.

Nightmares are terrifying. That’s the definition of it, after all.  _ A terrifying dream;  _ that’s the result the girl got when she searched up the word on a whim, when she wakes up smothered by blankets again but too late because Harukawa has already woken up and sits underneath the shower. As if that would wash away the guilt, pah.

The dreams Yumeno has of holding Tenko’s hand, of sitting in front of the other girl and performing spells and watching her eyes sparkle - those aren’t nightmares. They don’t end badly, either. If anything, they end happily, with promises on each other’s lips that go something like “I’ll see you tomorrow, then” and a cliche line about vowing under the summer’s breeze. They were picture perfect dreams, more perfect than any of the pictures Yumeno’s spells would be able to create if she only had enough mana.

So maybe calling them ‘very sad dreams’ would be a bit of an injustice for them, but she still wakes up with a lump in her throat and tears coming out in big, fat clumps from her eyes. It still comes as a big rush when she remembers the blade piercing Tenko’s body, the way it was almost  _ Yumeno  _ who died for Tenko and not the other way around, and when  _ that  _ happens she can’t stop the low whine that rises up in her throat.

“Yumeno?” says Saihara’s face as it floods her blurry vision, and she curses herself for crying so easily. “Shhh, it’s alright now. You’re with us.”

“Mmm. Saihara.” Yumeno covers her face with her too big, too long pajama sleeves and refuses to look him in the eye. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” It’s Harukawa who talks this time and if it’s  _ Harukawa  _ that’s getting all sad and stuff for Yumeno, the phony magician feels really bad because when the heck  _ did _ Harukawa get sad? And stuff. “It’s...alright to cry.”

“No it’s not.” A little wail rises up in Yumeno’s voice that she desperately tries to keep down. “I-I...we’ve been goin’ to all that  _ therapy  _ and...and stuff. I didn’t even have a nightmare like you guyses do. I-I just...I  _ just…” _

Yumeno can’t see anything around the fabric of her sleeves, and she bites down on it, frustrated at herself. “It’s okay,” Saihara says again, stroking her hair, and Harukawa clears her throat and begins to hum loudly, even more off-key than Saihara and Yumeno have ever been. The noise shocks Yumeno so much that she pulls her sleeves down slightly, if only to see what Harukawa was doing.

At both of their gazes, Harukawa flushes pink in embarrassment. “Well, it helped the both of you, right?” she mutters. “Don’t...don’t fucking look at me like that. This is helping. I’m helping.” With that, she continues humming ‘twinkle twinkle little star’ over and over and Yumeno can’t help but think about how that was the sort of nightmare they thought Akamatsu would have.

Saihara must know it too, because he leaves the room and Yumeno feels bad about it until he returns with three mugs of hot chocolate. “Here you go,” he says softly, handing the mug with the alpaca print to Yumeno. She smiles thinly and nods in thanks.

“I hate hot chocolate,” Harukawa says when Saihara hands her a mug. “Also, I wanted the alpaca mug.”

“Maybe next time,” Saihara says, and Harukawa snorts but continues humming anyway.

As much as Yumeno loves sipping hot chocolate and snuggling with Saihara and Harukawa at two in the morning, she sincerely hopes that there will not be a next time. 

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave comments and kudos if you enjoyed!
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvkGWdmYuaY If you didn't get the reference to Amami's dream, I recommend watching this video to enhance your experience.


End file.
